Heer Waris Shah
ਹੀਰ ਵਾਰਿਸ ਸ਼ਾਹ·ہیر وارث شاہ
A Critical Trilingual Edition — Gurmukhi · Shahmukhi · Roman
This edition presents Wāris Shāh's 18th-century Punjabi masnavi Hīr in its two historical scripts, Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi, side by side with a Roman transliteration and a word-by-word interlinked lexicon. Every stanza is cross-checked against primary published sources, and any word can be clicked for its gloss, grammar, and etymology in place.
240 of 629 stanzas are live in the Heer Waris Shah — Trilingual Online Edition, with the remaining corpus in active preparation.
Acknowledgements
This edition's base text is Jeet Singh Seetal's critical edition of Heer Waris Shah, cross-checked line by line against it throughout.
Waris Shah closed his own telling with a prayer for everyone who would ever come near it — the one who wrote it, the one who reads it, the one who only hears it read aloud:
"Forgive the one who wrote these words, and grant your grace to the one who reads them. Bless the one who listens with joy and plenty — and keep alive, my Lord, the zeal and the longing."
Over two and a half centuries later, that zauk te shauk — that zeal and longing — is still exactly what carried this edition, stanza by stanza, to here. Waris Shah asked that it be kept alive. This site is one small answer to that.
Closing this stage of the work feels less like finishing a task and more like reaching the end of a reading — the quiet after the last verse, equal parts relief and loss. If anything in these pages moved you, that's entirely his doing. If anything is wrong, that's mine to fix.
— Tejinder